November 2, 2001

You could tell I was no debutante

I was so gonna jump on the dream-discussion bandwagon, but I'm a week late with no excuses to offer, it's just that when I started writing up the, um, research for this article, I got caught up in the desire to clean out my filing cabinet- not that I finished… Actually, I got through about half my files and then decided a semi-clean apartment was more important than a neat drawer and put almost everything away.

Anyway, the way I work is- I carry notebooks. Usually these are about 6 inches by 9 inches, ruled paper, white and blue; light enough for sketching, lined enough for prose. And, to their credit and my eventual frustration, every page is a mixture of the fifty thousand stories I tend to work on all at the same time. An idea about the developing plot of one, a character sketch for another, and a line of half-remembered dialogue from something entirely other, plus an account of a dream. Every one of these notebooks documents the stories I was playing with over the several months it takes to fill a book and how easy it is for me to skip from topic to topic with wild abandon. The first of these, which is not the first, but the earliest one I have in my possession- the others are deservedly enough molding in my parent's basement most of a continent away or were previously salvaged for parts and already filed - the first of these was begun in, as far as I can count back accurately, early 1997.

I didn't set out to clean out my filing cabinet, what I set out to do was to take that earliest book and break it into pieces that could be separated and filed or shredded entirely. There is nothing like the peace of mind that comes with owning your own personal paper shredder.

And then it got complicated. It wasn't simply a matter of tearing pages out and putting them in the appropriate files. It was tearing pages out, deciding their relevance to present plot-lines, character re-evaluation, etc. I have been working with the same story (or setting, I should say, since the focal characters have changed) for eleven years.

Damn.

Anyway, it seems that 1997 was the year I really switched over from prose with the occasional doodle to a doodle-based approach. And it was probably that year that gave me the experience that enables me today to execute a picture in pen on blank paper with proportions that do not scream out as obviously demented. But the pictures from 1997 were not good. At all. And certainly not worth keeping. I took my 1997 notebook to work and began to type up the prose bits- separating out the dreams, scanning for the lines that involve the same characters or situations, running into systematic problems where I would have a dream that became the backbone of a situation, or the basis of a character- which is the case with most of my characters/ situations, but with many of them, I've just long forgotten the dream.

And I redrew things I came across. If it was one tiny sketch on a page devoted entirely to something else, if I wanted to trash one side of the page and not the other, if the drawings just plain sucked but were thematically important. And, not wanting to add another page to already stuffed files, I began to look through those files for pages that were half empty. And then I began to spot pages in the files that would be better off not in the files. And then I was off on a monumental task on top of a monumental task. And every time I came across a dream I typed it up. I went through my other notebooks, just for dreams- I'm not ready to dissolve them all. I like the file thing- where you can pick up exactly what you're looking for in an instant. I like the notebook thing, where you can see what I was focused on, and how these things relate to each other, and random notes I just happened to jot down. I struggle between order and chaos. And sometimes, order wins.

So now I have this huge file of my dreams over the course of four years. Not all of them, or even all that I remember because I'm sure there are many still hiding in the file cabinet, many that I represented pictorially instead of with prose, many that are recorded only in their modified-to-fit-a-story form, many that were never recorded at all.

It's not like I could tell you what I dreamt about last night either- only that it was heavily influenced by the fact that I recently decided that Lawrence Block is god and have been reading a book of his a day for the last week.

Many dreams seem to be recorded as briefly as this one:
"cheerfully painted wooden swords"

I know it was more involved than that. On the other hand, there are some that I didn't add to my, um, database because I didn't feel like typing up two or three pages of plot exposition.

And some that I did type. But I'm not going to bore you with a long involved dream narrative. This article's getting pretty damn long as it is.

Instead I'm going to bore you with a few insights about myself that I came up with drudging through four years of subconscious activity.

First of all, I seem to have an inordinate fear of angels. There are a series of me vs. the angels dreams. Or me getting in the way of the angels. Me watching an angel massacre the passengers in a train. Me and a vanful of people on the run from an angel we can't seem to shake. To me, it seems, angels are just like vampires that can go out in the sunlight. There's quite a lot about demons, too, but demons seem less likely to be interested in killing me than in just hanging out.

Another popular theme is the GULAG. All those years of Russian history and literature have finally paid off. Cecily dreams of the complete destruction of mankind and I dream about women who, sensing their imminent arrest, entrust their children to complete strangers. I dream about women released after seven years undeserved imprisonment who fear, rightfully, that they will only be picked up and re-interred.

Then there are assassins, gangsters, brutal deaths and war. I am a soldier, I am trying to avoid soldiers, I decide to join the army on the strength of a moment's fleeting contact with a stranger. There are these dreams where war is just a circumstantial thing, a force that changes men "he was a tailor before the war and a rockstar after"- there seem to be a lot of variations on that one.

There are dreams about assassins crossing over to other dimensions, assassins falling in love with mechanical men, assassins who, having left the killing life behind, are confronted with random acts of violence.

And I'm not even going to start on the superhumans that have been invading my sleep for the last year or so. The thieves that make pacts with the young ladies of the household. The young ladies who smash heads into porcelain sinks. The clockwork men and women. The people who are animals. The interrupted lives, the prisons, the slave-states, the returns to high school and college. The men who haunt my dreams simply because they seem better informed than anyone else and therefore sinister. The magic battles, the melodrama, the houses that change their occupants… my life as a dancer, as a spy, as a witch, as a sacrificial victim, as a fully-realized someone else.

I dreamt I was underwater walking in a corridor made of glass - and the glass kept the water out, but not the fish.

-Leslie

It doesn't matter what I'm thinking, what I tell myself to do…